1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to digital television broadcast methods, more particularly to a data service associated with a digital television broadcast and a receiver mechanism that utilizes the data service.
2. Background of the Invention
The amount of broadcast information available to television viewers is extremely large and expanding. With the advent of digital television, even more content and more information will become available. This incredible amount of information and content makes it very difficult for viewers to sort through what is available and to determine what they want to see.
However, even though digital television broadcasts will increase the amount of information available, it has mechanisms within it that can be utilized to help viewers sort through the information. The Audiovisual Program and System Information Protocol (PSIP) is a broadcast of service information that allows the viewer to access information about the content of a given audiovisual program, such as its title and its scheduled time of broadcast. Audiovisual programs as defined here include events as defined by PSIP and other types of broadcasts and is not intended to limit the types of broadcasts in any way.
Even with the information available from the PSIP, however, the amount of content a viewer can see in any given period of time is limited. Audiovisual programs may be stored to be viewed later or only a summary or highlight of the audiovisual program may be desired for quick discovery and browsing of contents, viewing key events, viewing key objects such as famous characters. A visual summary or highlight is formed by a set of frames (key frames) or a combination of segments or clips (key clips) that are most representative of the program content or containing an event or a character of interest.
In addition, with the use of digital signals and digital equipment, the capability to store audiovisual programs in some sort of memory will become more available. The viewer may not want the entire audiovisual program stored, but only a representative section of the audiovisual program, or only important events in the audiovisual program. Summaries or highlights would again be useful in this situation. Summaries and highlights are obtained as a result of filtering out unimportant parts of audiovisual programs; they include important segments or clips of the program.
Viewers can use the PSIP information to find and choose the programs they want to watch, which will be referred to as filtering the available programs. However, PSIP does not include information to filter out uninteresting parts of a particular program, such as summarizing and generating a highlight of a program. Therefore, a need exists for broadcasts to include summaries or references to already-identified important events in an audiovisual program that allows the viewer to efficiently manage and customize the viewing of the audiovisual program.